


only 90s kids remember

by hargrievances



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Dancing and Singing, Dysfunctional Relationships, Eventual Fluff, F/M, Gen, M/M, Sad Hargreeves Family, Sadder than intended, The Hargreeves Are 90s Kids, canon-typical angst, idk what it's called but you know the one, oops lmao, x + 1 format
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2020-09-06 07:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20287588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hargrievances/pseuds/hargrievances
Summary: Seven times the Hargreeves remember nostalgic music as adults, and one time they enjoy it together.





	1. Creep- Radiohead

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be based off [this really cute textpost](https://27-umbrellas.tumblr.com/post/186351404590/the-hargreeves-kids-guilty-pleasure-songs) and I do still fully plan on the end being nothing but tooth-rotting fluff and some of the chapters in particular being much happier, but like, I also accidentally made the first chapter really sad and I don't know why I did that either.
> 
> I was like, "aw it's so cute to imagine them singing old 90s bops they grew up with and having silly guilty pleasure songs, I love that!!" but then.

There isn't too much to do on the moon. Sometimes, when he lets himself be honest, Luther isn’t sure why _this_ was the thing he’d always wanted to do as a child. The longer he stays up here (it’s been almost a year now!), the more he loathes the silence and emptiness all around him, the more he misses the hustle-bustle of the city, of his house, the way it had been when he was a kid.

Luther’s heard talking to plants gives them spare oxygen and keeps them healthier, so he talks to Walter (his umbrella plant) quite a lot. He’s sure he would have lost his mind a long time ago without those friendly little leaves to confide in. 

Grace uses the radio Dad gave him just to chat some days, and those are the best days Luther gets.

Maybe the thing is, he would like being in space a whole lot better if he wasn’t alone. If he had a team of fellow astronauts to spend time with, if it weren’t for an indefinite amount of time, if it were more like those sleepaway camps he’d always heard about as a kid but was always too busy to actually go to.

He misses his record player with a deep aching. When Five had gone missing, when Ben had died, when Klaus finally left Luther as the last Hargreeves standing, music had been there for him, silly and trite as it may sound.

Mom hasn’t called all week and Luther is worried. 

He’s hungry. He’s making do with what food he still has, but he can’t stop worrying. Hunger headaches really aren’t a good feeling, but they’re getting more and more frequent the more Dad <s>neglects</s> forgets to send him enough food. 

He’s done his reports for the day and he’s bored, he’s sad, he’s miserable.

He sings quietly even though he knows he can be as loud as he wants in space. “_I don’t care if it hurts, I want to have control. I want a perfect body,_” his breath catches and he feels tears trying to start in his eyes. “_I want a perfect soul…_”

He gets louder the more he remembers the way the guitar rises in intensity throughout the song– “_I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo… _” – and he goes quiet again as he remembers Thom Yorke does at the end– _“What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here.”_

It’s silly. Luther knows that song wasn’t written with someone in his situation in mind, far from it. It’s a love song, and Luther’s never properly been in love. (Or maybe he has. How would he know?)

But maybe in that moment, as he squints at Earth through blurry eyes out his porthole window, maybe in that moment, the song is for him, about him.


	2. ...Baby One More Time– Britney Spears

Diego shuts the car door too loud, and Eudora rolls her eyes. 

He wants to apologize, but he doesn't know how. She’s all hard angles, sharp edges. She’s going to break up with him soon, he just knows it, and he’ll deserve it when it happens, because he can never do anything well enough, can he? Not even love.

The Police Academy turned out to be a bust for him. It had been a stupid idea from the beginning, but Diego still couldn’t say he’d seen it coming. He had never been as clever as Five or Ben, never been an eager-to-please little soldier like Luther. It pains him to think that Luther would probably go far at the Police Academy, because even now, it still pains him just to imagine his kissass of a brother being better than him at anything.

But then, on the other hand, Diego is relieved. He’d seen the way some of the officers talked down to (or outright mocked) some of the recruits who weren’t (straight, white, cis, male) exactly like them. Hell, he and Eudora had been on the receiving end of their nasty prejudice a few times and quite a few times, he’d had to knock some of their teeth out just to prove a point or defend someone’s honor.

Diego knows he has a problem with anger, he can admit to that, but he figures, at least he’s always angry for the right reasons.

His superiors shouting orders at him in physical training felt too close to childhood memories at _another_ academy for comfort, so sometimes, he’d just had to shout back–

He’s glad to be leaving, glad all his stuff is in the trunk of his car and not in the stupid gray bedroom he’d shared with stupid _Topher._ He’s not about to cry. There’s not a choked-up ache in his throat, nope, not at all.

But he turns on the radio, because he’s sure the second Eudora tries to talk to him his voice will crack– or worse, stutter.

_“Oh, baby, baby, how was I supposed to know… that something wasn’t right here?”_

Eudora laughs a tiny little laugh and coughs to cover it up, but she can’t cover up the way her eyes have gone just the slightest bit aglow. “I haven’t heard this song on the radio since I was a kid.” She taps her fingers against the car window to the beat. “My sisters and I used to get all dressed up in mom’s jewelry and pretend we were," she hesitates, embarrassed. "We'd pretend we were filming a music video. I–” she cuts herself off in the way she often does when they talk about their childhoods, because she knows there’s precious little he can actually relate to. 

“We had half an hour. Of free time. On Saturdays,” Diego says. “Strictly enforced.”

Eudora winces on his behalf. “Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah,” Diego agrees. “We snuck out some nights, don’t worry. But– Klaus and Allison used to love Britney. Allison had the uh– CD of this and she’d play it every goddamn day. She was so annoying. But we used to dance–”

“We?”

“Hell yeah, ‘Dora. You know I love to dance.”

“To Britney?”

Instead of responding, Diego lets himself be impulsive, lets his walls come down in the way that they only ever do around people he really, really loves, the people he would kill for. _“My loneliness is killing me and I… I must confess I still belie- eve– still believe…”_

Eudora beams, joining in where he left off. _“When I’m not with you, I lose my mind… give me a si- iiiign!”_

_“Hit me baby one more time!”_ they sing together at the very top of their lungs, before they break down laughing. Diego sobers up first.

The song’s going to end, and this moment of happiness along with it. They'll go back to snapping at each other. Diego will have to figure out what he wants to do with his life now that he's apparently not going to be a police officer. Diego's starting to lose energy as they keep singing, and there's nothing new about that. Diego’s happiness never lasts for very long. His anger is a constant raging inferno inside of him, but his spells of happiness are better described as short bursts of light, like fireworks or fireflies. They're beautiful and wonderful, but they always end too fast.

Diego misses Klaus. Misses when Klaus used to steal Allison’s skirts and the only thing he smoked was weed. Diego misses Allison.

The radio goes to commercial break after the Britney song ends, and Diego resolves to just turns it off, grinding his teeth in his mouth.


	3. Lucky- Britney Spears

Allison knows she’s blessed. Gifted, enchanted, whatever. Her golden voice gets her everything she could ever need or want. She knows she technically has it better than a whole lot of people. With the mysterious circumstances of her birth, then the childhood fame of Academy, she’s been in the limelight since the moment she came into the world. She’s never had to work for her fame or fortune, Allison wants for _nothing_–

Except that she does, but she doesn't know what.

She sips at the same cocktail she’s had in her hands for the past half hour as music blares, and a swirl of Hollywood’s hottest topics mingle around her. Her feet hurt, and she’s afraid she’s going to yawn _so loud_ the next time she’s forced to make small talk with another self-important director who thinks he hung the moon because he found a new way to tell the same story.

She used to rumor partygoers who annoyed her into leaving her the hell alone, but it was a minor scandal in the tabloids when she got caught doing it, so now she just smiles under the weight of her suffering. 

Not everybody here is too bad; Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson look just as uncomfortable as she feels.

Tarantino’s talking out of his ass again, Allison can hear his smug voice all the way from where she’s standing.

She wishes Klaus were here, so they could make fun of him together. Klaus is so funny in such a distinctly clever, distinctly _Klaus_ way. It’s a little sad, but she tries to imagine him standing there next to her, dressed to the nines in something sparklingly ostentatious. 

He’d be shoving petit-fours into his mouth, delighting in making people Allison doesn’t like uncomfortable. He’d see Kanye West and say something…

Shit, what _would_ he say, exactly? 

That’s where her imagination fails her, she guesses. Klaus’ unpredictable wit is beyond its limits. 

She notices the song that’s playing is one she recognizes. It’s one she hasn’t brought herself to listen to in ages.

_“She’s so lucky, she’s a star,  
But she cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart… ”_

Allison knows the painful truth about herself very well: she’s not happy. 

Usually these parties make it easy for her to ignore this, but tonight, with this song, all she can think of is going to events as the Umbrella Academy and playing tag with Diego and Five in the yard of the mayor’s mansion when everyone else was distracted. God, Five was such a terrible cheater at tag. 

Luther and Ben always hated the dressing up and social interaction part of the events, but the thing was, in the hours that the adults spent mingling at those dreary things, the Hargreeves kids had found time to talk and goof off.

It was terrible. Their whole childhood had been a nightmare. 

But there were tiny, fleeting moments like the half hour on Saturdays, and the nights they snuck out, and the warm hot cocoa with Grace at night, and yes– the times they actually got to have fun on their own at the events– that felt like happy dreams. If she closed her eyes right now and thought any harder about how much she missed those moments (just the moments, just her siblings, _nothing_ else about living in that godawful haunted house), she’d start bawling, she’d mess up the makeup that had taken hours for her beauty team to put on.

_“If there’s nothin’ missin in my life…  
Then why do these tears come at night?”_

She lets herself wonder where Klaus is. Britney Spears used to be their favorite thing to listen to together when they did each other’s nails and played dress up.

She hopes he isn’t dead.

She darts off to the bathroom so she can have a couple quick sobs and get her demeanor back to normal as quickly as possible.

Her heart only hurts a little, by the time the party is over.

Allison wishes, not for the first time, that her powers worked on herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am,,, finally feeling ready to multitask and start writing fic again. 
> 
> Stay tuned for more regular updates on this and my other WIP, and also a completely new au fic!!
> 
> also this song technically came out in 2000 and not the 90s, but it is TOO perfect for Allison.


End file.
